Ben Wilkinson Personal Account

I love my electric car, but I would never buy one as there is too much uncertainty over insurance and infrastructure

I have a confession to make: I have an electric car. And what’s worse is that I love it.

It is cheap to run, easy to charge, I don’t get range anxiety and it hasn’t burst into flames yet.

So far, my experience with electric cars has been seamless and faultless, but I still wouldn’t buy one.

I have a new MG4, a family hatchback shipped to my home from China, so there can be no pretence about me wanting one to save the planet.

The real reason I have one is simply that I needed a new car and could get one via my employer’s salary sacrifice car leasing scheme. The tax benefits of going electric are much greater so it was the cheapest option.

But most importantly, because I lease the car through a salary-sacrifice deal it means insurance, breakdown cover and tax (if there was any) is all priced in and that price is locked in for three years.

It is this peace of mind that I value most. Without it, buying an electric car in Britain today still feels like a big risk.

If I was to invest in a new car I’d want to know how much it was going to cost, year to year, and that it was going to last. We know very little about how much used electric cars will be worth in five, 10 or 20 years – especially as cheap Chinese models flood the market.

What is particularly concerning now is the surging cost of insurance that, thankfully, I am protected against.

We reported this week how electric vehicles are in danger of becoming uninsurable because of the vast cost of any damage to the battery, with cars being written off after minor prangs and drivers being quoted thousands for an annual policy. Manufacturers say batteries should last between 10 and 20 years, but if I’m forking out for a new car, I expect it to last a lot longer than 10 years.

Even signing up to a three-year lease seemed like a gamble with the extra red tape and lack of working and available charging points across the country.

After making the order, my local council said it would not let me install a charging point at my house because I do not have off-street parking. It didn’t matter that there’s no pavement in front of my house and the cable would cross over the boundary and on to the road by only a few inches.

Instead, I run a cable directly into an ordinary outdoor household socket, which is allowed but means the car takes more than 24 hours for a full charge of 300 miles.

As most electric car drivers know, you still cannot rely on public chargers. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve tried to plug in while out and about and the charger doesn’t work or I haven’t got the right app to use it.

Electric cars are great, clean and are lovely to drive, but the infrastructure we’ve been provided with still does not inspire confidence. It’s the same with heat pump technology. It will undoubtedly improve and become cheaper, so why risk investing in it now?

Rishi Sunak did the right thing by pushing back the ban on new petrol and diesel cars until 2035. Britain’s transition to all-electric needs to happen naturally and gradually if it is going to work.

The public should not be the ones forced to gamble their own money on the practicalities of Britain’s net zero future.

‘If I was to invest in a new car I’d want to know how much it was going to cost year to year’